On April 2015 the HWU team visited The Underwater Centre site in Fort William (UK) to conduct the final trials with Nessie AUV. The task is the Autonomous Inspection of a human-made structure and in this case the Fort William site represent a perfect place to test our effort in real sea conditions.

Nessie AUV has visited the site during early trials showing its capabilities over a different set of tasks, among which data gathering and long-term navigation. The experience collected during previous trials allowed the HWU team to identify a suitable mission area, monitoring also the effect of tidal currents that can affect the performances of the AUV while operating in shallow waters.

Fort William Mission Area

After some initial preparation runs, the vehicle has been tasked to carefully inspect a portion of the marine pier in complete autonomy, leaving to the team monitoring the evolution of the missions through the use of the operator interfaces developed during the project.

Nessie AUV inspecting pillars and crossbeams at the Underwater Centre

In this scenario the HWU team is able to test the final integration of all the main components of the PANDORA’s software architecture. Contributions from our partners KCL (plannning) and NTUA (robust control), as well as the agile integration process, allowed a successful trial campaign, resulting in 5 days of operations, several gigabytes of collected data and a high number of successful inspections in the real sea environment.